This is a post from my old blog, circa early 2006. It was probably its most successful in terms of readers (a modest claim, to be honest) and how pleased I was with it, and it also generated some angry responses, accusing me of petty, bourgeois narrow mindedness. That wasn’t my intention at all, of course - I just kinda thought that there was a a new generation of people that had forgotten, or had never experienced, true boredom in a world increasingly tuned to providing continuous partial attention. Self-indulgent it may be, but here it is again - now with footnotes!

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For those interested, we made an mp3 of the panel discussion I chaired last week at Develop about the relationship between videogames and architecture available on Edge’s website. You can pick it up here - sound quality and the fact I only remembered to switch on my dictaphone a minute or so into my intro aside, I’m pretty pleased with the way it went.

By the way, you can find a couple of write-ups of the session at Gamasutra and Pixel-Lab.

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I’m doing a panel session at Develop on Wednesday about the relationship between architecture and videogames with Viktor Antonov, the art director behind Half-Life 2 and (the unfortunately on-hold) The Crossing, Rob Watkins, an architect-trained artist on Fable 2, and Rory Olcayto, features editor from The Architect’s Journal and an artist at developer Inner Workings in the late 90s. Following are my introductory thoughts on the theme to get my head properly working on it all.

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I spawn on board my team’s aircraft carrier on the Iwo Jima map and board a landing craft which a team member steers for Mount Suribachi. With a commanding position on the top of the hill that overlooks the whole island and strong defences, Mount Suribachi’s a key point to hold, and the enemy has it.

We speed to the beach the runs around the bottom of the cliff beneath the position. It’s so sheer that you can barely see the sandbag fortifications at the top when you look up, but some steep paths zigzag up. Our hope is that the enemy hasn’t bothered to cover their base’s back so we can pop up and take the flag for our own.

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All sorts doesn’t quite feel right about the Watchmen film. It’s certainly respectful - deferential, even - to its source, and probably to a fault. But the niggling feeling I had while watching it was that at least some of the film’s problems are probably directly due to issues with the original comic.

Whatever the case is in a broader sense, the comic is a compelling document of the time in which it was written. With its inking style and thin, cheap paper, the comic remains an artefact whether you bought it yesterday or in 1987, lending it context and significance that distracts from its problems as a piece of storytelling.

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About a day after releasing the game, I got a mail saying basically “well, you got my money, but I can’t play your app because it crashes.”

To me, this feels like getting punched in the stomach: Somebody gave you his or her money, and the app doesn’t work because you screwed up or didn’t test enough or didn’t think of some special case. They have every right to be pissed off, because you basically stole their money.

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Our boy, who’s four, has trouble blowing his nose. Which is to say, he has no idea how to do it. “Blow out through your nose!” you tell him, and all he’ll do is sniff in. “Sniff out, like a dog!” you cry, but it’s to no avail. So far, we’ve had no luck in teaching him this apparently simple act.

Enter a new tactic. On most days, the boy’s favourite hero is Link. So how about getting Link to show him how to blow his nose? Enter dear Marsh, who has drawn a picture we hope can introduce the boy to the concept. Here’s hoping.

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Videogames give players choices. That’s because they’re interactive. Some people say a good game is a series of interesting choices. And games are beginning to give players a lot of choices to choose from.

Over the last few months, in my winding, amateur sort of way, I’ve been playing through Fallout 3. A role-playing videogame set in an alternative, post-apocalyptic future US, imagined as if the 1950s never quite went away, one of its big features is a great number of scenarios designed to allow players to decide how they tackle them. An often discussed, and probably the most interesting, is the Tenpenny Tower quest. For those wishing to avoid spoilers, you’d probably best not read on.

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I don’t know much about Finnish humour, but if The Man Without A Past is anything to go by, it’s about as grimly ironic as one might expect. Aki Kaurismäki’s 2002 film presents a story about Helsinki’s underclass that’s wracked with bleak suicide and rapacious extortion, sour bureaucracy and brutal robbery, but one also marked by disarmingly black comedy.

A flavour: the main character, who has been beaten by muggers so viciously that he has lost his memory, has found a dockland security guard willing to rent out to him a shipping container in which to live. Having no money, the man promises payment the next day, to which the guard threatens that he’ll have his dog tear his nose off if he doesn’t come through - and then remarks, “It’s no more smoking in the shower for you”. Because without a nose the water would stream directly on to the fag?

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It’s time to stretch my writing legs a bit more, and therefore time to reinstate Rotational, a blog I managed to break irrevocably with overenthusiastic database fiddling a year or two ago.

What to expect: personal reflections on

• videogames
• spatial and visual design
• technology and society
• meeja odds and sods
• stupid ephemera (should it not come under the above)

And a rather sporadic nature.

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